I concur with Andrii on that. The cost is very much dependent on what you really want the app to do. Also, bear in mind, an app is just the bit that people see. Depending on the functionality you actually want to provide, there could be a whole host of other services running and working together in the background that actually makes the whole system work and provide information to and fro from the app to the backend system.

Often major complexity of a large scale project really is at the backend rather than the actual app.

So, define exactly what you want it to do and also look at similar apps or services to research on feature set of the app. Also, there are various types of development approaches when it comes to app development. Generally, there are 2 types of apps - native and hybrid. In almost every way a native app will provide better user experience but is also more expensive than an hybrid app.

Depending on your business market you may want to look at focussing and investing the effort on development of an app for only one specific platform to reach more people / keep cost of development down / grow slowly based on service uptake.

I always advice to have an open chat with a technical team to asses what you're looking at even before focussing on the cost. Armed with all of these info you will be able to make a better decision.

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I have been working for some time with an inventor of literally voice translation software, (with interest from Apple, Microsoft and many others) but he is proving illusive and hard to pin down.

If you have something similar, I and my partners have access to substantial international funds and the management experience and qualifications to organise a public offering and subsequent administration., marketing etc..

If you are interested to have an initial discussion, email me your mobile number, or I can email you mine.

Something I thought about some time ago was when I visited China (without speaking or being able to read), I thought how awesome it would be to have an app that would allow to input Chinese by voice or OCR a photo.

I forgot about that thought but it just came up again when I read Peina's question. It is not that much related to learning - more to avoiding the need to learn ;)

As previous replies, make sure you're clear what you're trying to get before you start doing anything.

Being clear is the lowest cost part of it as it normally costs nothing but the most expensive mistake you'll make if you get it wrong or don't do it at all.

You also need to think about what you do with the thing you drive. If you objective is increased awareness then what's the value you get later? If you're collecting subscribers, what's you're plan to communicate with them - and what with?

And if you pre-launch - I just signed up and looks like you might be - then what does more subscribers do for you now?

When you're clear on those then you can think about what and where you're going to try and grow it to reach the sort of audience you need.

Social channels offer all sorts of ways to "engage" and get increased awareness that way - but what you do is probably a bit different in each platform.

If you have any money to spend then advertise carefully and target users as much as possible. You might find you're competing with foreign language courses in Search (so probably expensive) but you could probably find some lower and manageable costs elsewhere.

You probably want to think about whether you have the time and resources to do a bit of blogger / influencer / PR outreach too. This will be more effective after launch - but will also rely on the product / UI being very strong, so NM it's worth waiting for that moment if you're not there already.

I just launched https://www.leaknows.com a small translation app that does exactly as Google Translate, but also records everything you search and presents it to you as flashcards so that you can later practice and learn the words instead of forgetting them. I developed this out of frustration that I forgot everything I typed 5 minutes later.

So my question is, how would you go about marketing something like this on the cheap? Any tips?